


Still Life with Sniper

by Shayvaalski



Series: Minding Moriarty [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied Relationships, Indian Character, Mycroft-centric, POC Moran, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-03
Updated: 2012-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-01 00:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft--currently Moriarty's unofficial minder--spends an afternoon in the park; Sebastian has the day off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Life with Sniper

_i have other things to fill my time_  
 _you take what is yours and I'll take mine_

 

_  
_

Mycroft takes his tea in the park, where it is quiet and green and cool. This early in the season there are few tourists to ruin the scenery, so he sits on the patio of one of the half-dozen little cafés that run alongside the pond and reads the declassified but still necessary paperwork that was in his briefcase when he left this morning. In a little while Anthea will send the car along—it doesn't do to always be picked up from his front door, not with James' inexplicable sense of his schedule—and he will be whisked to the train station. He really does owe Mother a visit, thinks Mycroft, and sips his tea.

"Yeah, okay, and?" says a voice from a little ways away, almost an American accent, but overlaid with London, underlaid with the faintest hint of something else. He can't quite place it, and the man is standing with his back to him at the edge of the lake, throwing bits of bread to ducks. Mycroft picks up his newspaper, looks over the top of it. 

“Boss, I can't fuckin' hear you. Stop texting while you're on the phone, it's a—” The man breaks off, listens for a moment, rakes a hand through his black hair. Tamil. It's Tamil, very faint, a childhood language; Mycroft's mouth curls. “The fuck you mean,  _be nice?”_  he says, then looks at his phone is disgust and shoves it in his pocket.

Mycroft's mobile chimes a text alert at him, and the man's head snaps around.  _Be nice, angel_ , it reads,  _xx JM_. Mycroft sets his teacup down, and and when he glances up there is a dark figure looming over him. 

“Hello, Holmes,” it says, nasty and amused. “You do know how to bollix up a man's day off.”

“I wasn't aware weapons got paid holiday. Do go away, Colonel, you're spoiling the view.”

A laugh. “Better Moriarty's gun than Her Majesty's lapdog.” Sebastian Moran puts a hand on the low fence and vaults it, carelessly, landing next to where Mycroft is sitting. He's a tall man, but not a broad one, except across the shoulders, a little tousled and ill-used (Mycroft sees the dislocated finger, the shadow of bruises against the lighter brown skin of his neck) but, it must be admitted, rather striking. He is wearing jeans and a teeshirt of appallingly high quality, bought by someone who knows his measurements down to the millimeter, and carrying what most people would probably assume is a violin case in one square and delicate hand.

Moran sits, tucking his rifle beneath the chair, and then reaches across the table and pulls Mycroft’s plate to him. The waiter (a government operative, of course, and there’s a reason the elder Holmes favors this café above all others) sidles over and raises one eyebrow very slightly; Mycroft shakes his head. Sebastian, biscuit halfway to his mouth and looking unutterably pleased, says, ‘I'll have a coffee. He'll pay.” He takes a bite, then finishes it, and the way he licks his lips and swallows slowly is positively obscene. “These are the girliest damn cookies I've ever seen. Aren't you supposed to be on a diet?” A second, and then a third one vanishes, and this time he smiles, slow and mean. Mycroft snorts. 

“Your baser nature is showing, Moran; mind you look to it.” He snaps the paper, turns the page. “Jealousy is so unattractive in a man.”

Sebastian reaches up to take his coffee from the woman who brings it over, and adds sugar without even tasting it. “So's trying to be funny when you're not.” He takes a sip, and his hair falls into his face; Mycroft is mildly surprised that James allows it to grow so long. “And I don't have a damn thing to be jealous of.”

“Not even Sherlock?”

The look that Moran shoots him makes Mycroft understand, very clearly, why so few people have ever been able to lay a hand on Moriarty. His eyes are the grayish green of a monsoon sky, and harder than stone, and they take him in with no hate or rage or anything but the promise of an oncoming storm. “Not anymore,” says Sebastian, and it's Mycroft who looks away first.

Moran slouches, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, fingers loosely woven together in his lap and legs stretched out. He is barely taller than Mycroft but takes up three times the space, sprawling like a great cat. Mycroft makes the kind of dismissive noise that only Sherlock used to inspire in him, and sips his tea.

“Jim says hi,” says the other man, and smirks. “Says you should come round. Got a bit of a surprise for you, he says.”

“And you, Moran, what do you say? Or no, you don’t have an opinion to your name, do you. Are you his messenger dog too? Bark when you're told, and all that?”

“I'm whatever I need to be, Holmes.” Sebastian eats the last of the biscuits, dusting his fingers off against his jeans. The waiter, who has been nearby the whole time, brings another plate and glances at Mycroft, who waves him off. 

“Tell me, how  _does_  James get on these days?” Not, he thinks, like he doesn't already know—

“Generally with my cock in him,” says Moran, cool and collected in the morning sun. “Sometimes there's rope involved. If he'd known you were so  _interested_ , Iceman, he wouldn't have disabled the camera in the bedroom. Want me to get him to turn it on again?”

“I want no such thing,” snaps Mycroft, fumbling his biscuit. The sniper snatches it before it hits the table, slim fingers just brushing Mycroft's carefully done-up cuffs. “And do try to keep up, Sebastian, I'm not interested in your little perversities.”

“We did leave the one on the kitchen, though,” Moran continues, unflappable and grinning hugely. “Did you like the little show we put on for you last week?” He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one with a cheap lighter Mycroft suspects he only uses where James cannot see. There is a silence, punctuated by geese calling to each other. 

“He's well enough, for being leashed,” says Sebastian, finally, letting out a smoky breath. “Be better once he's slipped it.”

“I would advise you to caution him not to try. It would be a  _shame_  if he had to be destroyed.”

“Like you could ever touch him.” He flicks the cigarette butt over the railing and into the path, still burning, and stands. “Watch yourself, Mr. Holmes. You're holding the boss’s attention for now, but you know what he's like when he gets bored.”

_And why do you think we let him keep you_ , Mycroft thinks but does not say. Instead he squints up at the sun—it's nearly time to call Anthea—and places his teacup neatly in its saucer. There is hardly any mockery in his voice when he murmurs, “You're wasted on James, Moran.”

Sebastian tucks his hands into the pockets of his jeans, rifle case slung over one shoulder, and regards Mycroft for a long heartbeat. There is something of that long-dead tiger in him still.

“No,” Seb says. “I'm exactly where I want to be.” He vaults the fence a second time and stalks away into the park, pulling out his mobile as he goes. Mycroft folds his newspaper, resettles his tie and takes a breath. 

His own phone chimes. There is no end to this in sight.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for jackmarlowe. Lyrics taken from "The Cave" by Mumford and Sons. Again, because I have no self-control.
> 
>  
> 
> Update 9/5/14—upon re-reading this before I linked it on tumblr, I thought, Why does this Sebastian need to be white? 
> 
> And then I thought, he doesn't, and I like my slowly-growing headcanon of a half-Indian Sebastian so much, son of a British diplomat who married a Tamil woman, Eton and Oxford educated and yet still read as lower-class, who has a complicated relationship to imperialism and therefore Mycroft, and would follow Moriarty to the ends of the earth to take Britain to pieces. SO I CHANGED IT.


End file.
